Adrian Paci: Lives in Transit
Parisian museum Jeu de Paume runs (until May 12) a fascinating exhibition with the Albanian artist Adrian Paci, who lives in Italy. On tv screens, on big screens, with paintings – Paci circles around the theme, as he has expressed it, “of being at a crossroad, at the frontier of two separate identities”, going from one place to another, never leaving all from the first place and never getting all from the new one.
He has picked his small stories from his own life, often with great humour, as when a small 6 minutes video reconstructs him visiting a public office in Italy for an interrogation circling around pedophilia, because his two daughters have a tattoo on their shoulders… or his daughter telling a fairy tale, where she mixes animals and explosions, that she remembers from the war years at the end of the 1990’s. But there are also works which have a focus on the collective (photo) migration or beautiful sequences like one with a white horse and a naked woman in a fenced circle, filmed from outside.
For me the most attractive, however, is what happens on five screens placed next to each other under the title “The Last Gestures”. Run in slow motion you see a bride saying goodbye to her family before leaving for a married life. In documentaries this is what we often ask for – the catch of the magical moments in life.
The Jeu de Paume has posted an introduction to the exhibition, with an interview with the artist on youtube, fine gesture. Link below.
http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=61053#.UV_WNXDXV2Q
